For Every Grief That's Offered
by Assimbya
Summary: AU. Alone and together, Mina and the Count grieve, sole survivors of a private war. [Warning for depictions of violence.]


The first thing he did afterwards was wash his hands. She watched him, her dirty hands fisted in her skirts, as he scraped the blood from under his nails, his eyes low, his gaze safely away from the line of her own.

He had buried them, his wives, before returning to his castle. She had knelt next to him as he did it, the snow seeping through her dress to chill her knees and make her shiver. _Run, _her impulses told her, _flee, _but she could imagine him catching her, ripping at the flesh of her throat with his sharp nails, and she stayed, watched him bury his dead.

He had not offered to do the same for Jonathan.

And, when he finished, he led her inside, poured water into a basin, and washed his hands.

She thought, as she watched the movements of his pale fingers, of the heart-catching moment of that sunset, the backwards turn of the wheel of their story's climax. Jonathan's knife-wielding wrist twisted backwards by those same long fingers as the monster emerged, coffin discarded, into the cold dusk.

(She had run then, though she had no weapons but the cross around her neck, run to her husband's battle, leaving the professor to follow in her wake with faltering steps. But the Count had snapped Jonathan's neck by the time she reached them, and the thin weight of her body could not prevent the deaths of the rest of their band.)

In the immediacy of the present, he looked up and held out the basin of water to her. She took it, without gratitude, and washed her own hands.

_What have you lost? _she wanted to ask him, _What did those women mean to you? _But beneath those questions there was a truer one. _What shall I be expected to do to replace them?_

They were alone there, in his vast castle, survivors of a battle waged for months, quietly, in bedrooms and parlors and train compartments, but which had claimed its casualties upon the Carpathian snow.

(What should she have done, she wondered, when the professor had taken his stake and gone to the vaults of the Count's castle to perform a triple murder? What _could _she have done, ringed as she was in her prison of holy water? She could say none of that to the Count, and she did not wish to.)

With a damp hand he touched her cheek and she felt the pain in her thawing towards tears. "Will you kill me now?" she asked, and she could hear her voice hoarse and quiet.

"Yes," he said, no louder than she, and with no more warning than that syllable he pushed her face into the basin of water with the heel of his hand, holding her there as her body fought with all its mortal instincts of survival.

She did not know or care how long it took, but only that eventually her lungs accepted the dirty water in place of air, and, with great indignity, she died.

-

She awoke alone in a locked bedroom, dressed in another woman's clothes. A wineglass stood on the dresser, filled with clotted human blood.

The woman she had been would have tested the lock, searched the room for weapons, checked for loose patches in the stone walls. But the desire for such rebellion seemed to have been drained out of her with her mortality, and she lay for what must have been hours under the blankets of the bed, trying to ignore the lengthened eyeteeth in her mouth.

He came eventually, heralded by booted footsteps down the hall and the turning of a key in the lock. There was, she saw, a gravity to him that she had not seen before, a way in which the straightness of his back echoed the stone beneath his feet. He tapped upon the side of the still-full wineglass on the dresser. "Sit up," he told her, "let me see you."

He touched the side of her neck, where her pulse should have been and wasn't, and the spot between her ribs, and seemed satisfied. Then he said, "Open your mouth."

She did not, biting her bottom lip as though the childish habit was a safety. And so, roughly, he pulled up her top lip, looking at her teeth with all the impassivity of a doctor. Then he picked up the wineglass from the dresser. "Drink this," he told her.

"No," she said, though she wanted to, "no," she told him, tears coming shamefully to her eyes.

"You will," he said, "if I have to tie you up and force it down your throat."

And she sobbed, collapsing onto the bed like a woman from an opera. And he put down the wineglass and held her, and she cried in the arms of her husband's murderer.

When the sobs abated and he again picked up the wineglass, she drank. It tasted like his and filled her with warmth, though the liquid itself was long cold.

"I think that I am a prisoner of war," she told him when the glass was empty.

"No," he said, and he did not smile, "the war is over." He sat beside her on the bed and she succumbed to the grief-wrought madness at the corners of her mind.

"Are you here to negotiate the terms of my surrender?" she asked him.

"You will obey me," he said, "without question or hesitation. That is the entirety of it."

"That is difficult enough," she said, and it was neither apology nor challenge.

"I know," he replied.

He brought her out of the bedroom and to a small room empty but for a desk and a few chairs. He wrote letters on heavy paper and gave her envelopes to address. She did the work mechanically, writing the unfamiliar names on the list he gave her in her usual clean print, until the names became familiar – _Miss Sarah Holmwood, Mr. Alan Harker._ When she reached her aunt and uncle's names, she laid down her pen.

"What are you doing?" she asked him.

He looked at her without surprise. "It is proper in your country to notify the closest kin in the event of an individual's unexpected death, is it not?"

She stood, pushing the chair away from the desk. "I'm not doing this."

He stood as well, following her, backing her into the wall behind her. "Why? Are you afraid that you might close up all avenues from which you could now expect rescue? Well, my beloved," she was pressed against the wall, his body as close to hers as breath, "no one is going to rescue you ever again."

_The war is over._

She broke away from him. "Don't _touch _me," she spat, almost a reflex, but the anger behind it genuine.

He grabbed her left wrist, pulled it behind her back and twisted it till she could hear bones cracking and feel her eyes watering in pain. As a particularly loud crack elicited a gasp from her lips, he let go. "Finish addressing the envelopes," he told her.

She did, her left hand cradled in her lap, her handwriting unsteady.

-

By the time the sun rose, her injured wrist was entirely healed. He brought her downstairs, to a room filled with dark, simple coffins, and wordlessly drew her down to lie beside him in one of them. He laid his arm across her waist and she closed her eyes, trying to pretend that the smell of soil and the octagonal wooden walls at her back meant nothing. The two of them could be anyone, any couple sleeping in each other's arms.

He was asleep before her. She lay for a long time awake in the darkness, wondering if her hair smelled different than that of his other wives or if he could pretend she was any woman lying beside him.

-

The next night, he brought her out barefoot into the snowy pass beneath his castle. Jonathan's body was there, lying with the others, though she could hardly recognize his face, mangled, like the rest of his body, by the attacks of animals. Between the tears in his clothing she could see insects, come to feed on his too-mortal flesh. "Monster," she screamed at the Count, her words fighting their way through the cold wind.

He pushed her down in the snow and they hurt one another, her new teeth biting his shoulder, his fingers bruising her throat. It turned to sex, her elbows pinned against the cold ground but her consent bitterly given. (Did he ask? Only with his green eyes, as he bled from her wounds and the body of her husband rotted beside them. She said yes because it was better than the emptiness of her grief.)

When it was over she lay upon the snow and watched the dark sky. She was not cold. She supposed that was part of the change, a benefit of her immortality-damnation. She could have reached over, touched rotting flesh and said, _Jonathan, look at the stars._ But she did not. She looked at the Count, who was watching her, his eyes distant.

"Was I worth it?" she asked him.

He didn't answer. Instead he sat up and redressed, his movements precise. He handed her clothes to her, and she dressed, wordless. There was blood on the snow beneath her. She was not sure whose it was.

"Come inside," he told her. She did.

-

Again within the castle, he brought her to a wing that she did not recognize from any of Jonathan's descriptions and left her there, locking the door to what she soon realized was the only exit. He gave her no explanation. Alone, she wandered through the rooms in the long hallway, which seemed erratically to be recently lived-in or full of coatings of heavy dust. There were objects scattered over the floors and furniture – playing cards, embroidery needles, gem-colored dresses, jewelry, combs. As her bare feet tracked patterns in the dust, Mina's memory conjured up ghostlike trills of laughter. _Sister, come to us…_

Lightly, she touched a hairbrush, clotted with snarls of dark hair, and an old note, written on cheap paper in wild, curling letters. She could not read the unfamiliar words, letters affixed with symbols as foreign as magic.

On one of the carpets there was a bloodstain, dark and old. She knelt down and touched it, wondering, suddenly, _Whose?_

She stood, pressing her hand against the stone wall as if it could tell her. The feel of the stone brought a sudden flood of the Count's memories, garishly bright, overwhelming.

_Ileana's hair, knotted with drying blood, "Wash that out, my dear," and she pushes it out of her face, annoyed, rebellious, but she obeys, fetching water out of the well and heating it. He watches her tilt her head back to wet her hair, revealing the graceful curve of her neck, which he kisses, teeth barely grazing the skin and she laughs, her head back, a hand reaching to wrap around his shoulder. "Kiss my lips, why don't you," she tells him, and he does, her hair floating in the water like a nereid's –_

"No," Mina said aloud uselessly in the present, "not now," but again a memory came, persistent, and she didn't whether he gave them to her consciously or unconsciously, but still – _Ecaterina on her knees, her cheeks tear-blotched, looking up at him, "I don't know what you want me to do," she says, "I want to do what I can, I want to make you _happy –_" He winds his fingers in her hair, telling her, "Do what I ask of you and you shall. I do not expect from you a wife's dutiful service, my needs anticipated. Neither must you expect from me a husband's attentiveness. Our partnership is of another sort, a sort beyond those mortal distinctions. For ourselves we shall create it, fitting to us. Do you understand?" And she nods, she nods, and he takes her hands in his own and kisses her fingers, and she smiles –_

"Stop it," Mina whispered, "I have my own memories."

_He touches Adriana, not moving his eyes away from her own. His hands gently discover the contours of her flesh – her collarbones, her ribs, her breasts, the soft curve of her stomach, the jagged angles of her hips. "I am here," he tells her, "do not be afraid," and her lips tremble, fear like flame in her dark eyes but she does not move. "Good," he tells her, a reassurance, "my love, beautiful Adria, you have nothing to be afraid of." She does not flinch for his eyes hold her, safe, present, _his –

Mina hit the wall with the palm of her hand, not caring about the stinging pain it incurred. "What do you want from me?" she cried at him, and at the empty room.

The memories ended, abruptly.

Mina knelt down upon the stained patch of carpet and cried.

-

When he came for her, hours later, his hands were ink-stained. Neither of them asked questions of the other as he helped her up and led her out of the empty rooms and into his library, where he gave her a translation of Aristotle and left her alone. He returned to whatever activity he had been absorbed in, which involved many books laid open on a table, and scattered sheets of paper on which he was writing at various intervals. It was a long time until Mina had the courage to stand and go to see what he was doing.

He was studying Sanskrit.

Silently, Mina returned to her Aristotle.

-

That day, as she lay beside the Count in his narrow coffin, Mina dreamed of Jonathan.

When she woke, she could not remember the dreams, but her throat was sore from wanting to cry.

-

She found him alone the next night, in a chair with intricately carved armrests, his back straight, with a heavy book upon his knees. Taking her cue from his memories, she knelt beside him. "What can I do?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said, and, leaning down, he kissed her.


End file.
